FOREWORD Ever since Johannes Gutenberg transformed the printing of books, making them available to a wider public, books have captured the imaginations of readers everywhere, inspiring love, and even veneration. Indeed, books may be unrivaled in evoking such bonedeep affection. William Wordsworth said that these page-packed parcels have wings to take us 'as far as we can go', to 'wilderness and wood, / Blank ocean and mere sky'. For Alberto Ríos, they are 'the deli offerings of civilization itself '. When you enter a room full of books, even if you don't take one off the shelf, William Gladstone observed, 'they seem to speak to you, to welcome you'. They also ask to be handled. As Rosemary Griebel put it, books wait 'like abandoned dogs / for the warmth of hands on their spines'. Books are meant to be caressed, page by page, with a gentle downward motion, sometimes with a touch of moisture from the forefinger, as the reader leans attentively over them. Books awaken all the senses, and many people name the sweet, musty autumn scent in libraries and used bookstores as among their favorites, along with freshly cut grass and bread baking in the oven. Robert Chapman evokes that olfactory delight: 'Amidst the sweets and / Dust of the stacks / I edge from book to book like a grimy kid, / Flattening his nose against an infi nitude / Of candy store and bake shop fronts.' So we line our walls with them, spend the milk money on them, read them aloud, converse with them, argue with them, annotate them, learn from them, raid them, edit them, translate them, write more of them, and fail to winnow them - reaping the displeasure of our spouses and partners who threaten to turn us out of our book-crammed homes. Our adulation of books naturally extends to the consummate book place - the library. We remember and honor the awe-inspiring reading rooms with their stained glass, inexhaustible holdings, and sequestered places in the stacks where, with Billy Collins, one might hear 'a choir of authors murmuring inside their books / along the unlit, alphabetical shelves'. Over the years as a dean of libraries, I loved being alone in the library at night after hours, especially in winter as snow fell. The library in its warm calm had the feel of a snug subterranean greenhouse - a place where texts slumbered like seeds in their stiff jackets, awaiting human hands to crack open their husks and bring to flower the tales of novelists, the arguments of philosophers, and the diggings of historians. Not only are libraries the memory banks of civilization, they are symbolic sanctuaries of the freedom of a people to speak its mind. In the stacks a cacophony of voices is heard on every side of an issue, voices from the past and the present, from the center of the dominant culture and from the margins. The iconic figures of the past are routinely studied, interrogated, decried, demoted deconstructed, and revered - but never silenced or discarded. Minor ones and neglected ones are constantly discovered and rediscovered and promoted to principal interlocutors in scholarly discourse. Even the most hostile voices are accorded the same protected space. 'If librarians were honest,' writes Joseph Mills, 'They would post danger / signs warning that contact / might result in mood swings, / severe changes in vision, / and mind-altering effects'. Joining the tributes to libraries are those that honor librarians - the ones who welcomed the poets in their formative years into the world of books; who, as Nikki Giovanni says, first 'opened that wardrobe / But no lions or witches scared me'; dependable guides who over the years encouraged them to go deeper into the stacks and take an armload of adventure home, when it might be enjoyed deep into the night under the covers with a flashlight. The poets gathered here range from the author of Ecclesiastes in the third century BCE to canonical writers of British, American, and Spanish literature such as William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Pablo Neruda. Strongly represented are contemporary poets writing in countries across many time zones. Some are well known throughout the world, others enjoy regional status, and a few are published here for the first time. The love of books and libraries knows no linguistic boundaries, so a third of these poems have been rendered in translation. Interestingly, a number of the poets included have themselves been librarians, J. W. von Goethe, Coventry Patmore, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip Larkin and Rosemary Griebel amongst them. I should like to dedicate this volume to Katherine W. McCain, Virginia Ramsey Mollenkott, Kent Harold Richards, Howard D. White and Louis Charles Willard, for debts untold. Finally, as you embark on an excursion through these pages, a toast: May the bookshelves on your walls be full May the book stacks on your desk and by your chair or bed be high And may the doors of your library remain open - always. Godspeed Andrew D. Scrimgeour Excerpted from Books and Libraries: Poems by Andrew Scrimgeour All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
